Help Create A Chat Control Resistant Turnkey Chatmail/Deltachat Relay Stack - Rootless Podman Compose, OpenSUSE BCI, Hardened, & SELinux by 3nd5h1771fy

Description

The Mission: Decentralized & Sovereign Messaging

FYI: If you have never heard of "Chatmail", you can visit their site here, but simply put it can be thought of as the underlying protocol/platform decentralized messengers like DeltaChat use for their communications. Do not confuse it with the honeypot looking non-opensource paid for prodect with better seo that directs you to chatmailsecure(dot)com

In an era of increasing centralized surveillance by unaccountable bad actors (aka BigTech), "Chat Control," and the erosion of digital privacy, the need for sovereign communication infrastructure is critical. Chatmail is a pioneering initiative that bridges the gap between classic email and modern instant messaging, offering metadata-minimized, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communication that is interoperable and open.

However, unless you are a seasoned sysadmin, the current recommended deployment method of a Chatmail relay is rigid, fragile, difficult to properly secure, and effectively takes over the entire host the "relay" is deployed on.

Why This Matters

A simple, host agnostic, reproducible deployment lowers the entry cost for anyone wanting to run a privacy‑preserving, decentralized messaging relay. In an era of perpetually resurrected chat‑control legislation threats, EU digital‑sovereignty drives, and many dangers of using big‑tech messaging platforms (Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Instagram, SMS, Google Messages, etc...) for any type of communication, providing an easy‑to‑use alternative empowers:

• Censorship resistance - No single entity controls the relay; operators can spin up new nodes quickly.
  
• Surveillance mitigation - End‑to‑end OpenPGP encryption ensures relay operators never see plaintext.
  
• Digital sovereignty - Communities can host their own infrastructure under local jurisdiction, aligning with national data‑policy goals.
  

By turning the Chatmail relay into a plug‑and‑play container stack, we enable broader adoption, foster a resilient messaging fabric, and give developers, activists, and hobbyists a concrete tool to defend privacy online.

Goals

As I indicated earlier, this project aims to drastically simplify the deployment of Chatmail relay. By converting this architecture into a portable, containerized stack using Podman and OpenSUSE base container images, we can allow anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving communications node in minutes.

Our goal for Hack Week: package every component into containers built on openSUSE/MicroOS base images, initially orchestrated with a single container-compose.yml (podman-compose compatible). The stack will:

• Run on any host that supports Podman (including optimizations and enhancements for SELinux‑enabled systems).
  
• Allow network decoupling by refactoring configurations to move from file-system constrained Unix sockets to internal TCP networking, allowing containers achieve stricter isolation.
• Utilize Enhanced Security with SELinux by using purpose built utilities such as udica we can quickly generate custom SELinux policies for the container stack, ensuring strict confinement superior to standard/typical Docker deployments.
• Allow the use of bind or remote mounted volumes for shared data (/var/vmail, DKIM keys, TLS certs, etc.).
  
• Replace the local DNS server requirement with a remote DNS‑provider API for DKIM/TXT record publishing.
  

By delivering a turnkey, host agnostic, reproducible deployment, we lower the barrier for individuals and small communities to launch their own chatmail relays, fostering a decentralized, censorship‑resistant messaging ecosystem that can serve DeltaChat users and/or future services adopting this protocol

Resources

• The links included above
• https://chatmail.at/doc/relay/
• https://delta.chat/en/help
• Project repo -> https://codeberg.org/EndShittification/containerized-chatmail-relay

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Improve/rework household chore tracker `chorazon` by gniebler

Description

I wrote a household chore tracker named chorazon, which is meant to be deployed as a web application in the household's local network.

It features the ability to set up different (so far only weekly) schedules per task and per person, where tasks may span several days.

There are "tokens", which can be collected by users. Tasks can (and usually will) have rewards configured where they yield a certain amount of tokens. The idea is that they can later be redeemed for (surprise) gifts, but this is not implemented yet. (So right now one needs to edit the DB manually to subtract tokens when they're redeemed.)

Days are not rolled over automatically, to allow for task completion control.

We used it in my household for several months, with mixed success. There are many limitations in the system that would warrant a revisit.

It's written using the Pyramid Python framework with URL traversal, ZODB as the data store and Web Components for the frontend.

Goals

• Add admin screens for users, tasks and schedules
• Add models, pages etc. to allow redeeming tokens for gifts/surprises
• …?

Resources

tbd (Gitlab repo)

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Bring to Cockpit + System Roles capabilities from YAST by miguelpc

Bring to Cockpit + System Roles features from YAST

Cockpit and System Roles have been added to SLES 16 There are several capabilities in YAST that are not yet present in Cockpit and System Roles We will follow the principle of "automate first, UI later" being System Roles the automation component and Cockpit the UI one.

Goals

The idea is to implement service configuration in System Roles and then add an UI to manage these in Cockpit. For some capabilities it will be required to have an specific Cockpit Module as they will interact with a reasource already configured.

Resources

A plan on capabilities missing and suggested implementation is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZhX-Ip9MKJNeKSYV3bSZG4Qc5giuY7XSV0U61Ecu9lo/edit

Linux System Roles:

• https://linux-system-roles.github.io/
• https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/openSUSE:Factory/ansible-linux-system-roles Package on sle16 ansible-linux-system-roles

First meeting Hackweek catchup

• Monday, December 1 · 11:00 – 12:00
• Time zone: Europe/Madrid
• Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/rrc-kqch-hca

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Liz - Prompt autocomplete by ftorchia

Description

Liz is the Rancher AI assistant for cluster operations.

Goals

We want to help users when sending new messages to Liz, by adding an autocomplete feature to complete their requests based on the context.

Example:

• User prompt: "Can you show me the list of p"
• Autocomplete suggestion: "Can you show me the list of p...od in local cluster?"

Example:

• User prompt: "Show me the logs of #rancher-"
• Chat console: It shows a drop-down widget, next to the # character, with the list of available pod names starting with "rancher-".

Technical Overview

1. The AI agent should expose a new ws/autocomplete endpoint to proxy autocomplete messages to the LLM.
2. The UI extension should be able to display prompt suggestions and allow users to apply the autocomplete to the Prompt via keyboard shortcuts.

Resources

GitHub repository

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Update M2Crypto by mcepl

There are couple of projects I work on, which need my attention and putting them to shape:

• M2Crypto

Goal for this Hackweek

• Put M2Crypto into better shape (most issues closed, all pull requests processed)
• More fun to learn jujutsu
• Play more with Gemini, how much it help (or not).
• Perhaps, also (just slightly related), help to fix vis to work with LuaJIT, particularly to make vis-lspc working.

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